


Apple Hearts

by Psilent (HereThereBeFic)



Category: Steam Powered Giraffe
Genre: M/M, Shipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 14:19:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HereThereBeFic/pseuds/Psilent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael gave Peter a laboriously drawn picture of the two of them in lab coats, standing over a vat of bubbling chemicals, which was what science meant in first grade. Peter grinned, and promised to hang it up on his wall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apple Hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wasthatapun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wasthatapun/gifts).



> I made it my mission to write a Peter/Michael fanfic so sickeningly sweet that Pun (my girlfriend, Was-That-A-Pun on tumblr) would have to like it at least a little. So. I tried. This is not set in any verse I normally write in.

Peter Walter VI was not a popular child. He was born in the wrong decade for it. There had been so much going  _on_  in the world when the first few Peter Walters had been born - wars and discoveries and scientific strides. There hadn’t been time for things like shunning.

Technically, his father had been born in the wrong decade, too, but his childhood was kept busy with things like trauma and custody battles. Peter the Sixth did not have the luxury of such distractions.

What he did have was school. The Walters were trying to pull strings to get him taken out of the system to be educated at home, but that involved getting themselves approved as educators, and those strings were long and barbed and tended to get caught on questions like “Do any of you actually have a teaching license?” and “ _How_  old is Wanda Walter, exactly?”

So Peter went to kindergarten.

There were no catastrophes. Nothing exploded. Nothing  _im_ ploded. Peter didn’t show up with toxins or combustibles or questionable wounds. He was a Walter, but he was five years old, and his parents loved him.

Which was not to say that there weren’t  _problems_.

He was smarter than everyone else. Not in the different-thinker, troubled-child, misunderstood sort of way. In the accidentally-but-unavoidably-annoying, clearly-and-uncomfortably-better-than-the-kid-next-to-him, finishes-the-worksheet-early-gets-bored-scribbles-equations-his-father-taught-him-that-frighten-the-teachers sort of way.

The lack of any sort of worried phone calls from the school lulled Peter the Fifth and Annie into a false sense of security, for a while.

Peter wasn’t the dramatic sort, at least not yet. Time would tell. But for the moment, he didn’t rant about his teacher. He didn’t complain about bullies. He didn’t fulfill the miserable-student stereotype of coming home and crying every day. He went to school, he disliked it, and then he came home and enjoyed not being there anymore.

He wasn’t picked on, exactly. The other children left him alone - not out of mercy or spite, but merely due to the fact that he made them, somehow, uncomfortable. It was an innocent sort of shunning, but it still hurt, a little. When he thought about it. He didn’t, much. It was kindergarten. There were always things to do, and plenty of them didn’t require playmates.

And when he did need someone, there was always Michael.

Michael Reed, who would answer to Michael or Mikey but giggled if you called him Mike because that was what people called his dad. The first discussion Peter had with him was a long and winding one that began with the question of why daughters were never named after their mothers and ended with the best ways to hide spots of glue or paint in the carpet.

He wasn’t sure if they were friends. But if anyone played with him, it was Michael. If anyone talked to him, it was Michael. It wasn’t that Michael went out of his  _way_  to do it - he was friendly to everyone.

Peter didn’t mind being a part of “everyone.” It was kind of nice, not being singled out.

-

Peter had always known vaguely that Valentine’s Day was a  _thing_. He knew about the hearts - not real hearts, even though that would have been cooler - and the candy. He saw that on tv and in books, and heard it in The Jon’s stories. He knew his father brought his mother flowers one day every year and they stayed in a vase on the table for a week and then died and looked strangely menacing until Wanda or somebody threw them out.

When his teacher told the class that the day’s assignment was to make Valentine cards for their friends, Peter shrank down into his seat and tried not to listen to the chatter that immediately kicked up around him.

He heard it all anyway. Beth was making Valentines for Suzy and Tommy and Bill and Charlotte and Gary and Tim and -

\- and the rest of the class, it seemed. Except him.

It wasn’t even on purpose. She just stopped listing names before she got to his.

So did everyone else.

Peter put his head down on his desk and tried to take a nap.

Twenty minutes later, there was a tap on his arm. He looked up and Michael Reed was standing next to his desk, holding out a strangely-cut piece of paper.

Peter stared at it.

Michael rocked on his feet. “It’s s’posedta be a heart,” he explained. “Like a real one, ‘cuz you like science and stuff and doctors are a kinda scientist and doctors look at real hearts, not Valentine hearts. I don’t ‘member what a real heart looks like, ‘cept when I saw a picture in a book I thought it looked kinda like a apple, so I tried to cut the paper inna’a apple shape.”

Peter took the piece of paper. It was red and had his name written on it in alternating pink and purple, the capital  _P_  drawn and redrawn heavily over a crossed-out lowercase one.

For about a second, he had the sudden and horrible urge to cry.

Instead, he asked, “What’s your favorite color?”

Michael grinned. “Purple!”

Peter nodded. “Go back to your desk,” he said solemnly. “You’re not s’posed to see cards before they’re done.”

Michael darted back to his seat to work on more Valentines, and Peter slowly made his way to the front table with all the construction paper and decorations.

The teacher smiled at him. “Hello, Peter. Feeling better?”

He shrugged. “Hi, Miss Lizzie. I wasn’t sick.”

“You didn’t want to make Valentines for your friends?”

“I didn’t think I had any is all,” he explained quickly, not wanting to get in trouble for skipping the assignment. “But I think Michael’s my friend, so I need to make him one.”

Miss Lizzie smiled that strange, sad smile he’d only ever seen grownups use. “What kind of Valentine do you think Michael would like?”

“Purple,” he said seriously. He stared down at the supplies on the table, snatching up a piece of purple construction paper and then finding himself at a loss, frozen by the sheer variety of glitter and paint and crayons and markers and ribbons and other things that looked like they would just make a mess if he so much as touched them. “…But I don’t know what else.”

“Do you want some help, sweetie?”

“I wanna make it.”

She nodded. “Of course! Can I give you ideas?”

He thought about this. He thought about how long it would take him to come up with any good ideas of his own, considering he didn’t know much about Valentines or friends or what to do with either of them.

He nodded. “I guess. Thanks.”

Under Miss Lizzie’s close supervision, he cut a piece of purple foam into a slightly crooked star. He then carefully wrote Michael’s name out in glue - all capitals,  _MICH_ on the top line and a slightly squashed  _AEL_  underneath, with a smiley face thrown in as an afterthought in the empty space beside it - and covered the writing with rainbow glitter.

At the end of class, Peter tapped Michael on the shoulder, waiting until he turned around to pull the Valentine out from behind his back.

Michael’s face lit up. “Wow! No one else made me a star! Thanks, Peter!”

“No one else made me anything,” Peter mumbled, suddenly shy. “S’I wanted t’make somethin’ cool f’r you.”

Michael tucked the Valentine carefully into his folder. Then he gave Peter a hug.

Peter hugged back, a bit startled. He couldn’t remember ever getting hugged by another  _kid_.

Michael stepped away and tugged on his coat and backpack, running out the door to join the other kids who walked home with one of the grownups. He stopped in the doorway and beamed at Peter over his shoulder. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Peter!”

-

So Peter had a friend.

It became a given that he and Michael would sit together, that they would be partners for every project, that Michael wouldn’t play a game at break time if Peter wasn’t at least invited to play, too. Peter usually said no, but he liked that Michael made them ask.

Whatever lingering guilt his classmates might have had began to fade - they didn’t need to worry about Peter. Michael would be his friend. They were in the clear.

Later in life, there would be some amused bitterness at that. For now, Miss Lizzie made worried note of it, and Peter and Michael obliviously played with a train set while Peter explained how steam engines worked and Michael hung on his every word.

-

In first grade, Peter turned six. Peter the Sixth was six years old, which at the time made both him and Michael giggle. They wrote sixes all over everything - papers, binders, on their arms when they were bored. A lot of the grownups seemed worried about this, until they explained it. Then the grownups just told them not to do it anymore. They listened, but only because it had been starting to lose its entertainment value, anyway.

As Valentine’s Day approached, Peter thought long and hard about what to make for Michael. He didn’t worry about anyone else - they weren’t going to make  _him_  anything.

Michael liked music. Peter drew a guitar and gave him a pair of tiny finger cymbals that had been taken away from Rabbit long ago. (They’d been taken away from Michael, too, before ten minutes was up, but he got them back after class.)

Michael gave Peter a laboriously drawn picture of the two of them in lab coats, standing over a vat of bubbling chemicals, which was what science meant in first grade. Peter grinned, and promised to hang it up on his wall.

Then Michael said he had a surprise for him, and led Peter back to his desk, which he opened up to reveal nearly twenty paper hearts - some of them Valentine-hearts, some of them apple-hearts, most of them purple.

“You said no one else would make you anything,” Michael explained. “So I made lots.”

Peter gave Michael a hug, this time.

-

And so it went, year after year. In fourth grade it suddenly became very funny to a lot of students when boys gave other boys Valentines, but this didn’t stop either of them. Michael laughed at everything, and Peter was used to being the outcast.

Though he did find the sudden actual  _attention_  startling.

-

In sixth grade, Peter liked a girl. Her name was Vanessa. She didn’t know he existed.

“I asked my dad what I should do,” Peter said one day, as he and Michael lay on their backs under the climbing frame at recess.

“What’d he say?”

“Don’t build her a bunch of robots; it might seem like a good idea at the time but in retrospect your descendants and the scientific community at large are going to think it was kind of creepy.”

Michael snorted. “Well, there you go. Give her flowers or something.”

Peter frowned. “What if she’s allergic? Or what if they’re the wrong color? Or both? What if she still thinks it’s creepy? What -“

“Dude. Just try it. The worst thing she can do is say no.”

She said no. Very politely. She handed the flowers back to him. Very politely. She walked away. Very quickly.

Peter threw the flowers out. He bought a purple one and gave it to Michael.

Michael gave him a simple folding card that said “sorry I give bad advice, why do you still listen to me?” on the front and “at least she didn’t punch you, xoxo Michael” on the inside.

Peter punched his shoulder and said “Like this, you jerk?”, and they both laughed.

-

The first and only time school actually made Peter cry, he was twelve - almost thirteen, so almost a teenager, and in eighth grade besides and so almost in high school, which all added up to approximately  _too old to be crying_.

Michael, who was already thirteen, told Peter that was stupid and followed him into the bathroom to sit on the floor with him.

“I just want  _out_ ,” Peter said miserably, hiding his face against his knees. The bell rang to signal the end of the passing period. They both ignored it. In the back of his head, Michael hatched a vague plan to drench them both with sink water and tell the teacher in a panicked rush that there had been a horrible plumbing accident.

“I can’t - I can’t _be_ here, Michael.”

Michael bit his lip, thinking over what he could say.

Peter  _didn’t get_  upset. This was unfamiliar territory - though not any that he was unwilling to explore for his friend’s sake. He just didn’t want to get it wrong. “What do you mean?” he asked carefully.

Peter sniffed. “I’m not - I can’t  _do_  it. I can’t - it’s too… It’s too  _normal_ , Michael.  _Everyone’s_ normal. Everyone’s normal and I’m  _not_  and they  _know_  it and no one t-talks to me and if they do it’s to m-make fun of me, and I spend all night learning what to do if some specific thing goes horribly wrong with the robots’ cores and then I have to - to do  _history_  homework, stuff the robots could be  _teaching_  me, or  _math_  homework, and I learned it so long ago from my dad I can’t remember it, and I argue with teachers because _I know they’re wrong_  because my uncles or my Aunt Wanda was around when something happened or my dad or grandpa or great grandpa disproved or proved a scientific theory or - and then I just get in trouble and my dad tells me not to worry about it but my Aunt Wanda gets mad at him  _and_  me and says I have to be a good student if I want any of the homeschooling stuff to go through because no one’s gonna send me to be taught by anyone who teaches me to argue with authority and do my homework  _wrong_  and - and - I can’t, Mikey, I  _can’t_ ; high school’s gonna be worse, it’s always worse, it’s worse for everyone, I’m g-gonna get shoved in lockers and I’ll be in detention all the time and we won’t have a-any classes together and I can’t - I can’t - I  _can’t_!”

“They’ll get you out,” Michael said firmly, choosing speed over actual effectiveness and hardly taking any time to think through his words. “They’ll get you out soon, and before that, if anyone shoves you in a locker, I’ll get you out and we can fill theirs with frogs, and I’ll get detentions with you, and - and you can tell me about real history and science and stuff like that and I’ll do your stupid homework with my stupid homework. Okay?”

Peter sniffed, scrubbing his face with his hands and laughing. “Okay. Yeah. Thanks.”

They sat there the rest of the hour, planning the faces they would make at anyone who came in. No one did.

The next bell rang.

“Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day,” Michael said.

“I got you a bunch of candy,” said Peter, leaning sideways to rest his head on Michael’s shoulder.

“I got you a notebook,” said Michael. “To record the effects of me eating a bunch of candy.”

-

They got him out.

With a month left to go, Peter was informed that eighth grade was to be his last year of traditional school.

He and Michael had had lots of sleepovers, when they were younger. Always at Michael’s house. For the first time, now, Michael stayed the night at the Manor. He met the robots and liked them instantly, and The Spine shook his hand and said it was lovely to meet him (and Peter grinned because the code they had worked out for people the robots didn’t like was that The Spine would say it was  _nice_  to meet them. Lovely was fine). He didn’t ask about the lack of doors, because Peter had warned him not to. (“It’s just one of Dad’s  _things_.”) He charmed Annie, as usual, and said a polite hello to Norman, whom he’d never met, and was terrified of Wanda, whom he’d also never met but whom Peter had spoken of at length.

Peter showed him around the less immediately hazardous labs, proudly pointing out the one that had just been officially declared his and rattling off a list of experiments he’d been itching to do and would now finally have the time for.

Michael grinned at him and then started to cry, and Peter fell silent and let Michael hug him. He’d been counting on that happening at least once tonight. Michael’s voice had gone unprecedentedly quiet when he’d told him over the phone that he was leaving school next year.

Then they continued their tour of the allowed parts of the manor, making the long trek back to the main kitchen for a snack before dragging themselves up to Peter’s bedroom and collapsing.

They lounged around the rest of the day, talking about nothing in particular and everything in general. They both dozed off at around nine pm and woke with a start around eleven, when Marshmallow came in to check on them and meowed his disapproval at the sight of them both still wearing jeans and t-shirts and passed out on top of the covers. That wasn’t how humans were supposed to sleep.

The meaningless conversation resumed, mostly happening in sporadic bursts between silent contemplations of Life.

During a quiet spell, Peter checked his bedside clock and winced. He liked staying up late, and knew that he had better learn to like it a lot more, but five in the morning was pushing it when he wasn’t doing homework or an experiment. He hoped his mother wouldn’t be angry.

“Peter?” Michael said.

“Yeah?” Peter returned with a yawn, preparing to field another question along the lines of what would happen if somebody accidentally ate blue matter - superpowers and a very messy death being the leading proposed solutions to that particular inquiry.

Michael took a deep breath. “I think I wanna kiss you.”

Peter froze. He swallowed. He tried to think. Nothing came to him. Eventually, he managed a word, though he wasn’t sure it was the one he’d been intending, if he’d been intending one at all:

“…Why?”

He felt the bed move as Michael shrugged. “I dunno. No reason, I guess.”

“There’s gotta be a reason.”

“Does there?”

“There’s a reason for everything. You just don’t always know it. That’s part of scientific inquiry.” Good. Yes. Good. That was a safe topic. Scientific inquiry. He could talk about that for hours and not say something stupid. Something like  _I suddenly really want you to kiss me, too._

“Sooo,” said Michael, slowly, drawing the word out without meaning to, and Peter could picture the serious look on his face. “So, maybe - maybe if I do it, then I’ll be able to tell why I wanted to. Like an investigation.”

Peter gulped. “Maybe.”

The bed creaked as they both sat up, kneeling to face each other in the dark. Peter could barely make out Michael’s eyes. They were narrowed in determination. He imagined his own were probably stupidly wide.

“Does that mean I can?” Michael asked.

Peter nodded. “Yes,” he said hoarsely. He bit back several other things that were all running through his head in a clump of separate thoughts.  _But it won’t be - I’ve never - I don’t know - you probably won’t like it. I might not like it. I don’t know. I can’t promise._

Michael kissed him.

His lips were warm, and the heat of the rest of his face and body so close was warm, but Peter shivered. Michael drew back.

“Was that okay?” he asked, and the determination was gone from his voice. He was no longer a casually curious young man skillfully framing things in the context of scientific endeavor - he was a nervous fourteen-year-old boy who had just kissed his best friend.

Peter’s breath caught. He nodded, slowly. His lips were tingling.

Michael breathed a sigh of relief.

Peter, suddenly bold, put a hand on the back of Michael’s head and pulled him closer, and they kissed again, longer this time. Peter realized his eyes were closed. He opened them and found Michael staring right back at him.

They broke apart and lay back down, back to back. Peter stared at the wall. He could feel the bed shaking and was pretty sure it was coming from both of them. He took a deep breath but couldn’t stop his nerves jumping, arms and legs trembling. His stomach felt strange.

“I know why I wanted to kiss you,” Michael whispered, even though they hadn’t bothered whispering all night.

“Why?” Peter whispered back.

“Because I think I’ve wanted to do it for a long time, and this might have been my last chance.”

The bed moved. Peter held his breath and turned over, and this time he wasn’t startled when his eyes met Michael’s. “I don’t know how to kiss,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Michael shrugged. “Neither do I. I think you’re supposed to open your mouth at some point, but that… seems weird.”

“Ew. Yeah it does. Thanks for… not doing that.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And for… kissing me.”

“You’re definitely welcome.”

Peter felt his face heat up. He turned it down into the mattress to hide his grin, and felt Michael slip a hand into his. He gripped it back tight and fell asleep.

-

They meant to stay friends. They meant to get together once in a while, and they did, for a few months, and then Peter stopped suggesting they hang out, and then he stopped being quite so effervescently sorry when he didn’t have time when Michael suggested it, and then finally Michael stopped suggesting it and they stuck to long distance communication. Nothing so archaic as  _letters_  - emails at first, and then mostly text messages.

There was nothing bitter or angry about it. They were both  _busy_ , was all. Peter was busy figuring out how to be a Peter Walter and Michael was busy figuring out what the real world was like and how to live in it as a teenager and then an adult.

Michael knew when Peter nearly gassed the house with chloroacetic vapor, and when one of the bots malfunctioned badly enough to spook him, and when the band’s popularity started to surge again, and when Peter didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do about PR or why that had been left to him of all people.

Peter knew when Michael’s grades were up or down, and when he graduated with honors, and when he panicked because he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, and when he tried music for a year and panicked again because that wasn’t working or making him as happy as he’d thought it would, and when he decided to go into engineering.

They never talked about the kissing.

-

When Michael said engineering, something in Peter did - jump. Just slightly. Because maybe -  _maybe_.

He tamped the feeling down and continued on. He was a scientist, and now a PR manager, and he was  _busy_. He didn’t have time to get hung up on  _people_.

He did the same thing when Michael texted him, mostly in capital letters and mostly spelled wrong, that he was leaving school forever with an engineering degree under his belt.

When Michael sent in his application, filled out entirely professionally and followed with a text that said only  _SURPRISE! :D_ , Peter stopped. He left his experiment at a safe point and went upstairs and ate food and communicated with his family and didn’t think about Michael at all, and then he sat down and went through Mr. Reed’s application coldly and professionally and found it entirely satisfactory and sent Mr. Reed the standard email missive of acceptance, which took a bit of doing because first he had to make one.

When Michael showed up at the door, Peter said hello and it was good to see him again and shook his hand and stammered over almost calling him  _Mikey_ , and Michael grinned and accepted the handshake and it was all very businesslike, but in the way of children playing at being grownups. There were lines to give and motions to go through, and after they had run out of both of those things, Michael gave him a tight hug and Peter laughed into his shoulder and said he’d never told him how unfairly  _tall_  he’d gotten and they went to reintroduce Michael to the bots.

-

Michael started working for the Walters in July of 2008. A few months later, as the robots started performing more often, two more engineers were added to the roster. Steve Negrete and Sam Luke.

Strangers. Peter had the fleeting and strangely disturbing thought that this was going to be a repeat of elementary school, that they were going to be unnerved by him and he was going to end up communicating through Michael.

That didn’t happen, of course. The four of them got along just fine. Steve and Sam took very little time to get used to the robots, and after that the manor and all in attendance, and after _that_  Peter often found himself with three eagerly curious lab assistants. None of the others lived there, but morning often found one or two or all of them still hunched over a work table with Peter, or passed out on one of the benches.

So – a little late in the game perhaps, but – Peter had friends.

-

It didn’t occur to Peter to worry about Valentine’s Day until the week before, and then he was frantic in a frozen sort of way.

What was he supposed to do? Was he supposed to do anything? It was just a silly childhood tradition, right? But those were important to some people, weren’t they? Were they important to him? More to the point, were they important to  _Michael_? What if he gave Michael something and Michael hadn’t gotten anything for him and he thought he was crazy or laughed at him? But what if he didn’t get Michael anything and then Michael got  _him_ something?

Knowing better, by now, than to go to his father with this sort of thing, Peter went to The Spine.

“Get him something,” The Spine said calmly. “Just in case. Then wait to see if he gives you something first. Sir.”

Peter thanked him, gave him the usual discomfited reprimand about calling him  _sir_ , and set about making a Valentine.

He thought briefly of doing something cool and dramatic with chemicals and smoke and -

but no. Tradition was tradition. And he might as well go for a classic.

Sometime after 4 in the morning on February 14th, 2009, something slid across the hard floor of Peter’s main laboratory from the doorway. Peter set his work aside and picked it up.

It was a card.

He opened it. There was a piece of generic heart-shaped (but not a real heart shape) candy taped to the inside, underneath a short message:

_Remember this? I made you a crappy card so you’ll have time to make one about the same if you didn’t :P - XOXO Michael_

Peter grinned, then scowled until his cheeks stopped burning, and went to find Michael so he could hand over his construction paper star quickly enough to prove that he hadn’t just cut it out in a rush of panicked guilt.

-

It was late.

That didn’t mean midnight. It didn’t mean three in the morning. It was late by Peter’s own standards, and that meant it was Tuesday and he’d started this experiment on a Monday that wasn’t yesterday.

He should stop. He should sleep. Eat. Drink. But mostly sleep. He should really, really sleep. He’d sent the others away hours ago - they’d been with him since the Sunday that  _was_  the day before yesterday.

But he was so close to being finished with - well, with this  _stage_  of the experiment.

He tipped a vial into a bigger vial and watched the blue and white swirl angrily together and scribbled down his observations and heard something start bubbling and fizzing behind him and hadn’t he set that burner to shut off after five minutes two hours ago, or had he forgotten?

He didn’t turn to look. He didn’t try to stop it. He dove under a table and heard glass shatter and felt the floor shake under his hands and knees, and the explosion wouldn’t have been so bad except that it set off another, and another, and the color blue arced through the air like lightning in all directions, and something struck the table above him and he scrambled out from under it as it started to give and another spike of blue flashed across his path and he screamed and fell forward, clutching at his face and neck and still screaming, screaming, screaming as everything burned and tore and  _hurt_  and the world started to go dark.

-

He could hear people. Voices. Footsteps. His mother was crying. His father was shouting. Sam was shouting. Steve was shouting. Most of the shouting seemed to be about hospitals and whether or not they were a good idea.

Peter tried to sit up, to speak, to open his eyes, but he couldn’t move. He was just so  _tired_. And everything hurt.

There were arms around him. He recalled, vaguely, the feeling of being dragged across stone and carpet, a voice telling him to hold on, that he would be fine, just please  _hold on_.

With a surge of effort and energy, he opened his mouth. Something about it felt wrong. He opened his eyes. Those felt wrong, too. He was in somebody’s lap and they were staring down at him.

“Mikey?” he croaked, and wrong wrong wrong even his  _throat_  felt  _wrong_. He shut his eyes again and felt fingers stroking through his hair. “Hurts,” he mumbled.

“You’re okay, Pete,” said Michael, and Michael had never called him that, and his voice was shaking and Michael’s voice never shook. “You’re okay.”

-

Peter was okay.

He was a Walter. A Peter Walter. He was a Peter Walter whose experiment had gone wrong and hadn’t killed him, so he was okay.

His face was… not. It was not okay in the sense that it was not  _there_. He could  _feel_  that he had eyes, a nose, a mouth. He functioned like he had those things. But they were not  _there_. The whorl of blue matter left in their place and the whisps of it snaking down his neck and throat were fascinating, at first, and then horrifying, when the shock had worn off, and then he made the mask.

It wasn’t as simple as just a mask, of course. Laying the blue matter into the woodwork in exactly the right way that would allow him to see through it was tricky, and the end result of a dark keyhole that didn’t go through to the other side but was too deep to be only partway through the wood puzzled him a bit, but he figured it at least looked more interesting than a plain wooden mask and strapped it on.

And he was okay.

Ish.

He was a Walter. But his face had been blown off into possibly another dimension and replaced by a glowing blue vortex, and he was okay, but he was also, maybe, a tiny bit upset about that.

So he holed up in his room, which didn’t have a door to lock but which the others knew better than to enter when he was in a mood. Seeing as his moods were usually merely the result of not getting enough food or sleep, they especially knew better right now. Except for Marshmallow, who had always been free to come in and meow at him in distress and lick him up into the air until he finally laughed.

He didn’t laugh this time. He lay on top of Marshmallow and let the purring lull him into a half sleep.

The accident had happened in late January. It was now sometime in February, and Peter had reached the point where he cared enough to know that much, but not enough to know the date or the day of the week. It was progress.

One afternoon, or maybe midnight - he couldn’t force himself to move far enough to see if the clock was blinking AM or PM -, there was a knock on the wall outside his empty door frame.

He considered ignoring it. He considered the magnitude of what might be going on to prompt somebody to interrupt his solitude right now. He sighed, and grumbled, and got off the bed - Marshmallow was currently roaming the halls -, and went to answer the knock.

It was Michael. He didn’t look hurt or panicked and his clothes weren’t singed and Peter couldn’t hear any screaming from down the hall. He stared at his friend and waited for an explanation.

Michael didn’t grin at him, which was good, because Peter might have given him a black eye. But he did  _smile_.

He  _smiled_ , and stepped forward, and held out a piece of construction paper cut into a meticulously accurate human heart shape, ventricles and coronaries and other bits and pieces carefully colored in and labeled.

Peter turned it over. His name was written in glitter.

He couldn’t move. He couldn’t think. His heart and his head were both pounding and he felt like he might pass out and he was suddenly wondering when he’d last eaten something.

“…I didn’t get you anything,” he managed.

“You didn’t _die_ ,” said Michael. “Pretty awesome present.”

Peter’s shoulders shook with laughter and he finally looked back up, and Michael was standing closer than before, head tilted to the side. “Can I - ?”

Peter’s breath caught. Slowly, he nodded.

Michael pressed a kiss to the mask, just where Peter’s mouth should have been, and Peter wrapped his arms around Michael’s neck and held on tight and was slightly more okay than he had been.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Apple Core, Who's Your Friend](https://archiveofourown.org/works/739871) by [Wasthatapun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wasthatapun/pseuds/Wasthatapun)




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